“These millennials,” I told Henry, who was padding down the stairs. He’d roused himself from his sunny nap spot on my dresser to come see what I was doing.
I began sorting the forms into linked piles on the table’s surface. Henry, who had a double share of that magic cat ability to exist in the least convenient space, jumped to the tabletop. He flopped down on top of the Bouchards’ marriage license. I ceded the territory and gave him a chin scratch, glad to have his heartbeat in the house. I found the original petition for adoption, and under that, the official termination of Karen Vauss’s parental rights. I had a hard time swallowing as I set that one aside.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I needed to treat this like a job. Pretend this file was part of someone else’s lawsuit, random papers, telling me a stranger’s story.
Fine. This adoption had gone through Horizons Family Services, a private placement agency. They’d handled the complications caused by the birth mother’s incarceration. Ganesh Vauss left the hospital with Michael and Anna Bouchard two days after he was born, and the biological mother was returned to prison. The actual adoption took place six months later, after the paperwork and home visits had been completed through Georgia’s slow-grinding courts. At that point, a second birth certificate was created for Julian René Bouchard.
That got to me, again. The name Ganesh had been legally wiped away by a simpler one, chosen by a different woman and written on a new birth certificate. Gramma had demoted me down from Kali, and Julian’s adopted mother had performed the same function, though I hoped with kinder motives.
I’d found us a second point in common. We’d briefly been fatherless godlings from the same pantheon. We were just mortal strangers now: Julian and Paula.
I traced the letters of my brother’s second name, trying to imagine the preprison mother I had known giving up her baby.
Well, her back had been against the wall.
My grandparents might have taken Julian. He was a white grandchild, after all. But would Kai hand Ganesh to the same sour racists who had abandoned me to foster care? Or he could join me in the system, rolling the foster-parent dice. He’d be talking and toddling when she got out, imprinted on random strangers. He might get bad fosters, too, ones who would not hold him, who would let him cry. He wouldn’t even know that she was out there, loving him, coming to reclaim him. Adoption let her choose a soft place for him. It was one road out of a thoroughly shitty wood, and she had sent him down it.
She hadn’t even told me she was pregnant, but I could see that this had been a kindness. I was in that group home, and the main thing that kept me from falling off the world was my unshakable faith that Kai would rescue me. How do you promise your preteen you’ll come for her, but by the way, you’re giving up her brand-new baby brother?
Henry stretched, working parts of his body onto two other stacks of paper. I shoved my chair back away from the table and let him. I wished I had ten cats, enough to cover every bit of history. I was failing on every possible level to keep professional distance. I could see fresh ways that I had ruined my mother’s life rising up from the white space in between the words. I should have given the whole file over to Birdwine. He could have sorted through it, extracted anything relevant, and presented me with bullet points I could digest in tiny, manageable bites. He could send it in an email titled “Here is the information.”
I might do better looking at Julian’s present. The farther his life moved from our shared point of origin, the less personal it became. Birdwine wanted to do a background check before I contacted the kid, but Google-stalking could hardly be considered contact. I angled my chair toward my laptop and pulled the computer toward me, grateful that a family of Smiths hadn’t adopted Julian and named him John.
A quick Facebook search yielded three pages of Julian Bouchards and near variations. Midway down the first page, I saw mine. His curly hair was longer in the photo, hanging in shags around his ears. His smile pushed his eyes into half-moon shapes in that unendurably familiar way.
I clicked the link. His cover image was an eagle soaring high over a canyon, of all damn things. He had lax privacy settings, and I could see some of his posts: a picture of Yoda’s face with that quote about try versus do, a tiny GIF ant carrying a huge crumb, a video of a pretty girl in Singapore playing something haunting on a hang drum. My surprise brother had romantic notions.